Monday, February 18, 2013

Estimating the Number of Eligible Bachelorettes at BYU

A recent episode of This American Life has inspired me to do this post. So the
Drake equation is a mathematical
equation used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial
civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. I will be using a variation of the Drake
equation to find out how many eligible bachelorettes are at BYU. Let’s began!

First we will take the entire BYU student body.

Total
undergrad full-time student body size= 27,901 peeps

Next we will eliminate all the males (sorry dudes).

27,901
peeps x 48% = 13,392 Female BYU undergrads

Then we will get rid of those immature-not-yet-ripe-for-the-picking freshmen
that I don’t ask out.

Now I also don’t ask out girls taller than me or even close. I was standing
next to a girl yesterday that was my exact height (a tad over 6’00) and I didn’t
like it haha. I want to be able to grab my woman, throw her over my shoulder,
and take off. Granted, I’ve been doing a lot of shoulder workouts, but still, I
need to draw the line somewhere. 5’10” is my line. Good news is that only about
.7% of women are taller than 5’ 10”, so this step is kinda useless. Yeah….

10,044
Non-freshies – 70 tall lassies = 9974 survivors

Okay next step was the most difficult and probably the most insensitive. How
many of these 9974 brave survivors are, in my opinion, attractive? I can’t just
look this one up on the internet. My solution was to sit at the entrance of the
Harold B. Lee Library, where almost everyone goes at one time or another, and
count how many of the girls I found to be attractive or not. Sure that sounds
like the creepiest thing you have ever heard, but it was done for Science. FOR
SCIENCE! So really it wasn’t creepy at all.

Now this is a little tricky, because sometimes I don’t think a girl is super
attractive, but then when I get to know her, she becomes more attractive.
Perfectly natural right? What I had to do was decide if she was attractive
enough for me to ever consider dating her - the bare minimum of attractiveness
to pass the imagination test.Anyways,
after ~70 girls walked by I decided I had enough and discovered that about 25%
passed.

That’s not too bad is it? It’s not like I need some blonde bombshell super
model that makes up .0001% of the population (I'd take one though). Especially considering that as
soon as I start dating a girl, I am expected to all of a sudden become so
selective that only 1 girl out of 3,209,000,000 are attractive.

9974
survivors x 25% = 2494 cute enough (to me) girls

I have to determine how many of the
remaining lovely ladies are married (cuz I’m no home-wrecker duh). At I have
heard that about 1/3 of BYU students are married. But because I am already
excluding freshmen, that number should be higher. Plus these are generally more
attractive than average girls, so I would expect that would also push the
number up. So we will go with 1/2.

2494
cute girls x 50% = 1247 no-ring-on-it cute girls

Now let’s estimate how many of these girls are truly single. No fiancés, no
boyfriends, no soon-to-be boyfriends, and the like. I feel like if you are a
cute girl at BYU you would be truly single only about half the time. This is
just judging from my personal experience. Some girls have a bf 90% of their
life and some have a bf only 10% of the time.

1247
no-ring-on-it cute girls x 50% = 624 truly single cute girls

How many girls are truly available though? My stake president told us that
almost a 1/3 of the girls in our stake have put in their mission papers. Plus
there are the girls that are unavailable because they are coming off a bad
break up, aren’t interested in dating right now, or maybe like girls (they
exist!). Chop off another third.

624
true singles x 2/3 = 416 availables

Before I ask out a girl I usually have a conversation with her or get to
know her through some mutual social event. After talking to a cute girl that I know
is single and available, I feel like half the time I come away thinking that I
should ask her out. The other times I can tell I’ll never ask her out because
she is too hyper, to uptight, too ditzy, or just straight up has the crazies
(they exist!).

416
availables x 50% = 208 girls I would ask out on a date.

I’ll stop there. 208. Seems kinda puny. You like to think that there are
thousands of fish in the sea, but it turns out there are only 208. This is
before even going on a date with them and finding something else that might
eliminate them! Or even considering how many of those 208 would like me (I’m
guessing in the low 200’s, I’m pretty dreamy). 208 is only like 1 or 2 per ward
– no wonder I don’t ask out any girls some weekends.

I know this isn't the most exact estimation, but I don't feel like its all that far off either.

6 comments:

Thanks for the comment on my blog :) I quiet enjoy your blog as well. PS I'm an Exercise Science major which you did not address in your "Majors" post. . . unless that falls under bio/public health/neuro

There are a few Freshman girls that are attractive and mature. They are usually 5-10 years younger than their older siblings so they had to be more mature. I'd give yourself another 12 girls or so on your equation. ha